Namoff, United Reach Deal

D.C. United General Manager Dave Kasper has confirmed to the Insider that the club has re-signed veteran defender Bryan Namoff. The club will make a formal announcement soon. Namoff joins Marc Burch, Clyde Simms, Greg Janicki, Thabiso Khumalo and Santino Quaranta with new contracts and, as you know, Gonzalo Peralta is gone and Gonzalo Martinez appears on his way out. Namoff had considered overseas opportunities; his wife has French roots, which makes him eligible for a foreign passport.

The New York-Dallas trade is now official: Midfielder Dave van den Bergh for forward Dominic Oduro and a second-round selection (18th overall) in Thursday's draft. In addition, the Red Bulls and Dallas have swapped first-round picks. New York will select 11th overall, Dallas 14th.

Thanx for keeping on top of the negotiations Mr. Goff.
Do you know what the general hang-up was? Was Brian seriously looking at overseas clubs, was it a question of guaranteed vs. option years? Money (IMO, doubtful unless United tried to talk him too far downward)? Did he just want to get away from LaNorte? ;-)

Good news. I did argue that the raise for Namoff might be too expensive within the cap, but ultimately this was the best outcome.

Now that it appears all the players worth re-signing have put ink to paper, I hope Kasper and Soehn will get to work on getting the required improvement at center back. We're not far from having a very good team. A good center back and a quality addition up front (which could be Walter Martinez), and I think we'd be looking at a team that can do some damage. We're in a good position in the draft to get GA players, which should save us a decent amount of money against the cap (not to mention having 26 players rather than 24 on the roster). If we took someone like Frei, we could probably trade Wells for a late pick or maybe even fleece someone into giving us a developmental player that's able to contribute in some way.

Namoff has been one of DC's most important contributors in the past few years. We're still pretty weak in the back but with Namoff back at right back we're at least not starting from scratch. With Namoff, McTavish, Janicki and Burch we can pencil in a defensive lineup but we're still probably one of the weaker defenses in the MLS.

Hopefully we can use some of the Gonsalos $ and draft picks to bolster the D a bit more.

I hope Martinez stays. Sure, he frustrated the hell out of me late last season by not coming back to defend when he got upfield - but damn, no one else seemed to be trying to create anything at times and at least he tried to go up and do something. He always seemed to me to go up when he got really frustrated with the midfield not penetrating. Plus, he played more games than anybody but maybe Simms. At the beginning of the year I thought he might be the best defender in MLS.

Goff has said a few times that Olsen playing again is a longshot. I guess the upside is that we'll soon see him classing it up on the sidelines as a coach.

Posted by: Colm1 | January 13, 2009 3:25 PM

Tino said something about Olsen, Burch, McT, etc. "playing" with the boys from "Maryland" a week or two ago... All of that was in Quaranta's mini interview on Behind The Badge that got posted right after his new deal was announced. Not sure of how hard they all were *playing* but seeing those words made me go, hmmm?